Upperlands Coffee Company is a small family business run by Julie and John Henderson.

Having developed an addiction to the delights of fresh ground coffee whilst managing a Dairy farm in western Mass in the USA when we returned home to Ireland we found it increasingly difficult to buy fresh ground coffee that we enjoyed drinking. In agriculture when we cannot buy an item such as a piece of equipment or a product to do a particular job to our satisfaction, then the usual solution after much pondering, trail and (mostly) error including the destruction of copious quantities of welding rods and/or binder-twine (and probably liberal use of swearing, taking your lords name in vain and long conversations with the dog) is to make the required piece of equipment or product ourselves on the farm.

So when we got thoroughly fed-up with what we believed to be fairly bland, acidic and unpleasant ground coffee available in most shops, we set out to make our own. In 2002 we bought an Alpenrost counter top coffee roaster and five bags of green coffee beans. These beans were from, Africa, India, Indonesia and South America. We roasted and blended (said a few bad words, blasphemed and had many stimulating conversations with the dog) made some fairly disgusting cups of coffee. Eventually we found several, in our opinion, very drinkable blends of fresh ground coffee. We then proceeded to try these blends out on our unsuspecting friends and neighbours. Remarkably there were no fatalities, in fact some poor, perhaps, misguided souls seemed to think that some of these coffee blends were quite pleasant and actually encouraged us in our efforts to extend our repertoire of blends for all occasions.

We continued to refine our range of blends until 2005 when we decided to try to make a business from our hobby. To this end we purchased a commercial coffee roaster, grinder and vacuum packaging equipment and started to produce and sell to an unsuspecting public our range of fresh roasted coffee blends. We can be found every Saturday (from 9am to 3pm) and every Sunday (10am to 4pm) in St Georges speciality food market in Belfast. We look forward to meeting you there.